


Cobwebs

by stateofintegrity



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: M/M, alludes to past assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:54:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27248350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stateofintegrity/pseuds/stateofintegrity
Summary: Just as Klinger once tried to salvage Charles' Christmas, Winchester works to make Halloween a little sweeter.  Or, not all scary stories have ghosts.
Relationships: Maxwell Klinger/Charles Emerson Winchester III
Kudos: 9





	Cobwebs

“I doubt we’ll see Klinger tonight.”

“On a holiday practically defined by costume? Why ever not?”

Pierce did not let on that he had seen how Klinger’s everyday costumes made the Bostonian’s eyes glitter. More revealing, still, Charles had a way of listening to Klinger rhapsodize about shoe buckles and buttons that was simply endearing.  _ Disappointed, Chuckles?  _ If BJ had been around to play the game with him, Hawkeye would have asked if Charles was holding out to see the Corporal in masculine or feminine attire. One was easier to fetishize but the other was rarer - and who knew what thoughts went on inside that brilliant mind?

“He hates Halloween.”

“As superstitious as he is? Is he hiding then from demons and goblins? Afraid to be led off by will-o-wisps?” But then he saw something in the other surgeon’s eyes. “Pierce?”

“It was before you were here. Frank, in his infinite  _ lack _ of wisdom, pranked the kid. The prank wasn’t a big deal, really, or it wouldn’t have been, but there were marines on base that night, too. The way I heard it, they might’ve messed with him some.”

Charles had treated his share of marines. They were tough, boorish, stupid… and licentious. Working girls had been known to make themselves scarce when they appeared; who needed the bruises? 

“How badly?”

“Radar’d be the one to tell you. He broke it up. I heard about it later. Whatever happened or didn’t happen, you’ll have better luck seeing a ghost tonight than seeing Klinger.” 

Charles thought about asking Pierce if he’d made Frank pay for the act. Pierce and the fabled Trapper John (now, Pierce and Hunnicutt) had a way of acting as shepherds for enlisted personnel that needed looking after… but Charles couldn’t remember a time when they’d stepped in for Max. Winchester knew that Hunnicutt was troubled by the implications of a man in skirts; he’d tried to talk Klinger into “normalizing” his attire more than once. Pierce… the Major frowned. Pierce was more likely to flirt with Maxwell than anything else - but such silliness might imply actual care, right? For now, he let pass the question of their gentle-eyed Corporal, but Pierce had seen something come over his proud face. The Captain had a feeling that, absent himself from the festivities though he might, Maxwell would not spend the night all alone. 

***

Winchester wouldn’t have liked it - but Pierce had read him rightly. He made his appearance at the company Halloween party (a step up from the year before which had been spent tending marines), but he left before the dead of night to check on a Corporal who was curled up in bed, just waiting for fright night to end. 

“Hiya, Major.” Klinger sounded like himself when he answered the door, and Charles saw no shadows in his eyes. “What are you supposed to be?” 

“I, ah, rather thought you would recognize it.” Granted, this ger up was hastily assembled and a different one than he’d worn to the party, but it had felt very fitting. 

He saw Klinger figure it out, only to shake a finger at him. “You’re coming way down in the world, there, Major.”

“Not ‘tall. With my schemer’s wits and glib tongue, the sky is the limit. Besides, it felt the right costume in which to make deliveries.” 

With that, he set out the treats he’d carefully collected - some sent from home and some from the party. Klinger’s smile softened at that - though the pretend Mud Hens jersey had gone a long way to cheering him up already! 

“You didn’t have to,” he started to say, only to find his words cut off by having those terribly long fingers pressed to his lips. 

“You did as much for me,” Charles reminded him.  _ With far less reason, too.  _

“Yeah, sure, but you didn’t owe me, Major.” 

“I managed to get you to say my name, then, if you recall, Max.” 

He remembered; it had broken down something between them. They had met, then, as friends for the first time. “Thank you, Charles.” 

The surgeon just nodded - the gesture just shy of a bow - and even though he was only wearing a white shirt he’d ruined with markers, Klinger couldn’t help but think of a knight. He’d needed one a few Halloweens back - but better late than never, right? (Especially when his knight looked like  _ that _ . Quality was worth the wait). 

They drank cider warmed on the stovetop and ate treats various personnel had labored over in their tents. Charles learned that Maxwell had a fondness for vanilla or marshmallow treats like seafoam candy - and he kept him entertained by talking about the overblown Halloween celebration he’d attended once in Salem, as well as the things he’d never done, like carve a pumpkin. Max assured him that he’d be good at it - he was a surgeon, after all - with a sort of cheerleading earnestness that touched his heart. 

Winchester grew brave enough, then, to ask about the doctor he’d replaced and Max’s desire to hide from the holiday. That there were rumors about him surprised Max not at all. That Major Winchester  _ cared _ about such stories - well, he wouldn’t have counted on that. 

“You weren’t even here, then,” he reminded the other man. 

“I am aware. I hope that if I had been, you might have come to me.”

Klinger considered it and seemed to find it difficult to visualize. Charles was lots of things - but easily approachable hardly topped the list. 

“It’s nothing to worry you, sir. I’ve had worse.”

Two things about this bothered the surgeon. He didn’t know how bad the Halloween incident had been, but  _ worse _ conjured images of Klinger holding a hand to battered ribs or a washcloth to a black eye, mascara running over the sharp bones of his cheeks. Furthermore, “sir,” was a tell. Klinger clearly didn’t like the topic of conversation but was too polite to tell a superior officer that his body - and any injuries it bore, past or present - was none of his business. 

“Worse” was for another time; he would earn those stories, Charles promised himself, and then earn the right of helping Maxwell to forget them. “I do worry, Maxwell. Imagined fears are always somehow worse than actual ones, no?” 

What the Corporal found hard to conjure was the fact that any part of the Major’s mind ever busied itself with imaginings that concerned him. Halloween might be the night when the veil between the dead and the living thinned, but even that wasn’t enough to mitigate the vast distances between a Boston blueblood and a kid raised mostly on his own pluck and cunning and mostly in the Toledo streets. Still, Charles looked genuinely interested and he’d done a lot, already, to redeem his night. 

“Okay.” He started slow, haltingly navigating a memory he didn’t like to visit in the first place. Burns and Houlihan had been morale officers that fall. Margaret had even bandied her connections with various brass into a box of genuine (tacky) Halloween decorations from the States - cat ears for her nurses and thick, cottony spiderwebs for the corners. 

“I think the prank was probably for Captain Pierce,” Maxwell explained when he reached the part about Major Burns sending him to supply. “But I upset Major Burns with my costume.”

“Which was?”

The Major was full of surprises tonight! “A tiger lily.”

Charles nodded at the fit of it. “You can more than do justice to orange.” 

It was nice to hear - sweeter, maybe, than the candy had been. “Thanks, Major. Well, supply had this mess of cobwebs- but they had some other sticky, stingy stuff in them. I got stuck and then something fell over my head, too. He probably woulda just laughed and let me out, but Major Houlihan was callin’ for him for something so he forgot about me.”

Charles had heard plenty of stories about Burns’ incompetence. But to  _ forget _ that lovely form in a tiger lily dress? He’d hated the man for the kiss he’d “accidentally” stolen from Max’s neck - but to leave him trussed up and helpless!? He made a quiet, unkind note to call home (circumventing Max’s aid, somehow) and to see if his father might help him pay Burns back a bit. Nothing too sinister - just something small to help him sleep at night. 

“And Radar eventually got me out,” Max tried to finish, then, dancing past the worst parts. 

Charles raised an eyebrow at him. 

“Okay, yeah, there was more. These marines came in looking for pills, maybe? Or condoms. They, uh, they weren’t sure what I was at first.”

Charles knew he didn’t mean the costume. He also knew that their method of determining Max’s gender (and Charles was of the opinion that genders would have been more appropriate, anyway) had been to pry his legs open, to press unwanted kisses to the nape of his neck. If he could have discovered their names, they would have been part of his call home, too. But they weren’t important tonight. “I am sorry, Maxwell.” But he was relieved, too, when Max revealed the rest, that O’Reilly’s gift had quickly summoned him to his friend’s side. He would make  _ that  _ part of his call, too - an unexpected windfall for Walter and his mother. 

“I told you it wasn’t that big a deal. Now you tell me something, Major. Why the sudden concern?” 

Charles might have told him that it was far from sudden. Instead, he told Max about Honoria - who also hated Halloween - about a princess dress besmeared by cretinous children who had used a holiday to act out their worst impulses toward an outcast. “I am not home to celebrate indoors with her, so I thought I would celebrate with you.” 

Klinger heard, but did not believe, what that meant. The Major was saying that he was worth as much as Honoria in his book. 

“As for the second reason, may I tell you the scariest story I know?”

Confused but curious, Max agreed. He liked to listen to Charles, anyway. Part of him couldn’t believe, not all the way through, that anybody else shared that accent. Given the man's costume, he wondered if he could make that posh voice say "Holy Toledo."   


“Our story begins at the end of a war. The tents have been struck. Goodbyes have been exchanged. Local merchants have appeared to snatch up whatever the army has neglected to pack up. The land that has been so struggled over looks much the same.”

“Except for the unexploded bombs and buried mines,” Klinger added with a scowl. “Hell of a legacy. It’s probably worse for you, huh? Being a doctor? I never fired my weapon at anybody. I’m not all that crazy about being on the side of the country that causes some poor farmer’s arm ta get blown off a year after we leave.”

“Just so,” Charles agreed. “Our… well, he is, I fear, no hero, but the focus of our story is returning home. He has existed there more in his mind than he ever existed in the country where he served, but he fears the place he has missed will now fail to sustain him.”

Klinger leaned forward, braced on his elbows. “Something happen to him over here? He got hurt?” His mind flicked back to Charles’ questions about that night with Burns. Was he leading up to some trial of his own? The surgeon was a big man - but no fighter. 

“Oh yes. Something shattering. Something he never suspected. It exists now as a terrible secret he is carrying home. Only one other has any inkling of what has occurred and how deeply it has affected him. He is transformed as completely as if he met with a witch’s spell or a vampire’s bite.”

Klinger smiled at this bit of seasonal fancy. “Our guy is doomed, huh?” 

“Quite. He says nothing. He carries his secret alone, unaided. And when he steps off the plane, it is to do so in a world where he will exist  _ utterly on his own _ . Uncared for. Unwanted. Unloved. Cursed.”

“He couldn’t meet somebody and fall in love?”

“Don’t you see, my dear? He already did. And he left them behind without speaking. He let his fear rule and ruin his life. Imagine with me the remaining years of this creature. He may celebrate successes in his work. He may keep a beautiful home. But who will ever care? Who will ever know him? What will his obituary contain but a few cold facts? He would have done better to die in the war, hero though he was not.”

Klinger understood the sadness at the heart of this story, but it wasn’t scary yet. “Couldn’t he reach back out? Y’know, to the person he left there? Call or write or something?” 

“I fear he is not made for such a brave act.”

Klinger frowned. “He needs a good friend to kick him around a little, to remind him how good he is.”

“How do you know he is good?”

“Anybody that could love like that couldn’t be a bad guy.” 

This observation charmed him. “We come to the frightening heart of our story now. Can you bear up, do you think, Corporal?” 

“You know I’m a scaredy cat, Major. But I’ll try it for you.”

“Maxwell, the life I have described to you is mine at the close of this conflict… unless you will consent to return home with me.” 

_ This is a trick. Has ta be _ . But he knew how to read those eyes - hadn’t he studied them every day since Charles had arrived?  _ Charles _ … 

“Charles?” It came out shaky - these syllables he rarely dared - but happy. 

_ Yes.  _ “Say yes, Maxwell. Save the poor fool at the heart of that story from the horror of a life without you.” 

He rose and stood before the other man, shook his head at him. “Most people let you know they’re falling for you in little ways so you can kinda catch on and catch up.”

“There was no opportunity to do so as I fell for you all at once, darling. It remains quite in your hands - whether or not I manage to get up.” 

“Oh, you’ll have to, Major baby. I don’t know the way to Boston by myself.”

Charles laughed - partly for joy and partly for this new pet name that came out in so practiced a manner that it suggested that Max might have made use of it before in his mind… maybe even in his bunk. “I promise to act as your guide, my dear girl. I shall even carry you over the thresholds if you wish - and there are quite a few of them.” 

The sudden brightness in Max’s dark eyes said he’d be more than happy with such an arrangement. “I don’t know how quick we’re getting home one way or another, Major. You think we can kick this fairy tale off here?” 

“Darling, if you think, given your blessing, that there is any force that can keep me from your side, you very much underestimate the desire I feel for you.” 

The Corporal liked the sound of that and the easy access promised by the Major’s costume. “You know, Major baby, it’s getting close to the witching hour out there.” (From the sound of things, the late hour had done nothing to diminish the festivities, either). 

“Ah, you wish to hide away from the incursion of spooks and spells, my sweet?” 

“If you’ll hide with me.” 

The narrow cot might have been the first place a wandering haunt would check - but the two twined and happy forms that came to occupy it would have been much too happy to have noticed! That Halloween, the pair heard only happy shrieks and screams - their own! - and knew that the years ahead now held much less to fear. 

End! 

  
  
  
  



End file.
